How did lockdown affect baby brain development?

How did the pandemic lockdowns disrupted the development of the babies born just before or during the pandemic? Deprived of the chance to play with others, and locked up in sometimes fractious family environments, have they paid a developmental price? Pasco Fearon is the director of the Centre for Child, Adolescent and Family Research at the University of Cambridge…

Pasco - For those of us who don't remember being two or three or one, you just have to kind of think for a second about what an exceptional period of development that is. A newborn baby changes so dramatically from the first days of life to the time that they turn, let's say, age three. By the time they're three, they're walking, they're talking, they're thinking, they're playing, they're doing an incredible number of things with sophisticated cognitive and language and communication skills. This is a period of life where the brain is developing at the most incredible rate, the fastest it will in the whole of the lifespan. And of course the brain, it has its kind of developmental genetically pre-wired program, but the way that it grows and matures is incredibly sensitive to and is in fact trying to build itself around all of the structured input that it receives from the environment. So if there is a major disruption to that, what could it do? We got quite a lot of concern and reports from the kind of professional sector working with young children that they thought they were seeing big delays in those sorts of developments in children. So particularly their language development and their ability to do basic things that they would need when they go to nursery like toileting, being able to tie their shoe laces, knowing how to relate to other children and so forth.

Chris - Must have been a double whammy really then because not only were children divorced from those normal social stimuli that you've outlined helped to mould us, but also if you've got a stressful situation going on and life at home is disrupted, the other major guide and influence on how we develop our our home, that's also potentially in jeopardy for a while, isn't it?

Pasco - That's a really important thing to draw out because at the time a lot of people were talking about school closures, nursery closures, and people like me were saying, yes we should be worried about that, but that's not the only thing that's going on. Actually, there's a lot of stress being experienced by families given what we know about child development. The family context is actually probably the most important driver of how well children do. And as you say, the risk was that it was a double whammy. So limited experiences outside the home, but also very stressful things going on within the home. It is worth talking a bit about why you might not see some negative effects too. We know from lots of research that brain development is extremely resilient in any child's life. They'll have various perturbations or things that kind of knock them a bit off course during their development. And actually if those perturbations are quite short-lived on the whole, the rule is that children tend to catch up. However, what we also know is that what tends to impact much more significantly children's development is factors that are quite persistent over time. So poverty, we know that poverty and all the things that go with that, which tends to be very stable over time, does have these long-term incremental negative effects on children's early learning and their longer term development. So for example, if the pandemic contributes to widening social inequalities, which it probably will do and has done, that's a more plausible influence on children's long term outcomes than the short term changes related to childcare, I would say.

Chris - Notwithstanding everything you've said in terms of the fact that there isn't a formal way of looking at this at the moment, what evidence do we have so far that there is an effect of these lockdowns, and what do you think is going to happen going forward?

Pasco - What do we actually know about the outcomes of children who are in the early years during the pandemic is a problem because actually the data we have are quite thin. Health visitors do a child development checkup when children are about two to two and a half years of age, and they use a standardised instrument for seeing how children are doing in terms of their language development, their cognitive development, and so on. And that has been collected relatively consistently over quite a few years, and we do have data from at least 2016-17 all the way through to now. If you look at the headline stats from which Public Health England publish, we're not seeing large changes in children's early development over that period. Having said that, there are some small declines that are kind of noticeable. So for example, if you look at 2017 to 2019/20 or something like that, about 88, 89% of children were reported to be achieving what we call the sort of expected level of development for their communication skills when they were two. If you look at 2021, it's about 85 to 86%. So there's some shift there, small 2-3%, something like that. But there's a clue that something might be happening. The other thing that's really important to think about, if you do get a small shift in where the average child is, let's say in the population, that might look small, but when you look at the extreme end, so the number of children over a threshold in terms of having quite significant developmental problems or delays, a small shift in the mean can mean quite a large shift in the proportion of children who are under that threshold in terms of their development. Of course, that's what the professionals will be picking up, is the children who seem to be really struggling.